


Edna Payne and the Gray Angels

by storyplease



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dystopia, Original Story - Freeform, Other, old ladies kicking ass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 19:03:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7280884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storyplease/pseuds/storyplease
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the old ways are the best ways...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Edna Payne and the Gray Angels

Edna Payne was seventy years young, and she did not take shit from anyone. When the Gov'ment came with its tanks and guns, she stood her ground and kept her head down, but only as much as she had to.  She had a root cellar that she kept stocked with food hidden behind a false wall.  She hid others, too, those who had angered the Gov'ment by trying to speak freely without a permit and a Gov'ment issued Speech Card.

 

Edna had creases in her face and tight, cotton-candy blue cornrows of wiry hair that ended at her waist, giving her the look of a raisin wearing a wig. The blue was a little joke she liked to play, for the Gov'ment expressly forbade anyone to dye their hair unnatural colors, but the blue was close enough to her natural gray to go virtually unnoticed unless one really looked.  Edna didn't like skirts.  She preferred black cargo pants because they had a thousand pockets and were much less unwieldy than wearing an apron all the time. Besides, wearing all black was useful.  It hid stains well, especially blood stains from that one time she slit the throats of two Gov'ment Thought Policers who'd been intent on savaging a girl of barely twelve for reading a book on a park bench.  The book had been Gov'ment approved, of course, but they didn't care- they just wanted to hurt someone and liked using their authority to do so.

 

Edna merely pulled her switchblade from her ruby red clutch and made short work of them, dragging them into a nearby pond where the alligators would make quick work of their corpses.  Lugging those bags of manure to her garden all those years had done her muscles a kindness, though her back ached for hours afterwards.

 

She knew she'd been lucky that it had been an oppressively muggy day, or the video drones would have been out, watching. The child had hugged her tearfully and called her "Gamma" before running home, but Edna hadn't minded that.  Though she'd never had any children of her own, she had at least ten nieces and nephews, though she only knew of a few that were still alive.

 

It was the best-kept secret, but it moved from mouth to mouth, always out of the eyes or ears of those working for the Gov'ment.

 

Everyone knew that Edna's house was the place to go to be safe if someone was looking for them.  She always had an extra bit of food when food was scarce.  And the Gov'ment always passed right by her- an old woman with a senile, toothless grin (she always palmed her dentures and rocked inanely in her rocking chair on her porch when a Thought Police vehicle was driving by, and it worked like a charm).

 

One night, there was a secret neighborhood meeting.  Over fifty people were packed into Edna's small kitchen (though somehow, she found a way for them all to fit, and there was enough food for them all).

 

"We must rise up and fight those bastards!" one man mumbled angrily through a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

 

"Yeah!" seconded a tall, gray-haired woman with a glass of ice water in one hand.

 

"I say we fight 'em," growled a woman whose large, luminous eyes and salt-and-pepper hair made her look like a rather intense owl.

 

"But what can we do? We're all so old!" lamented a thick-set man with square framed glasses.

 

"I'm old and I saved a baby from those damned Thought Police when they tried to take her innocence!" Edna said sharply from the head of the table, placing her spoon gently into her soup before standing and fixing them all with a steely glare. "We can't just sit around and wait for some young charismatic leader to change things for us. It'll be hard and it will not always be easy, but charismatic leaders don't change things. People like us, people who suffer and don't always come out whole or unscathed, we're the ones who make the difference!"

 

The others looked at each other in shocked silence for a moment before someone began clapping.  Soon the room was ringing with applause. Edna sat back down, adjusting her horn-rimmed glasses and looking somewhat shocked.

 

"Edna's right!" a red-faced man said loudly, leaning forward on his prosthetic leg. "We might be old and broken-"

 

"Speak for yourself, you lout!" yelled a wrinkled woman who raised her hook hand in an obscene gesture.

 

"Hmph!" the man snorted, "What I meant to say was, we might be a bunch of old farts, but we're going to give them a hell of a fight."

 

"Here, here!"

 

Soon, the room was filled with chants of "Edna! Edna! Edna!" as Edna pulled her glasses off and wiped tears from her dark eyes.

 

"After all," she said with a sly grin once the roar of the crowd finally died down, "they always expect young teen girls to come for them, which is why they've done so much to disrupt the education of our youth.  But even though my memory isn't what it used to be, my hand is as steady on my blade as it was when I was a girl.  They won't know what hit them.  I would rather go to my death a hundred times than wait for it to come to me under the oppressive reign of the Gov'ment!"

 

And thus began the story of how the Gray Angels became a name that made even the most hardened Gov'ment agent quake with fear.

 


End file.
